To grasp the deep architecture of the political today, therefore, is to venture into the theological domains of Christology and especially atonement, that area of theology (particularly, Christian theology) that deals with the logic of (redemptive) death. But the journey cannot be simply phenomenological in the way Kahn carries it out. Or, put differently, it may need to be phenomenological, but in a way that Kahn himself has not considered. Atonement thinking, and the “death contract” that binds politics, must, from within a different phenomenology (and therefore from within a different approach to political theology), be redirected. There must be a new future of death and the political.

The New York Times recently published an article by Trymaine Lee detailing the hard times that the smaller, less well-known African American churches in Harlem have come upon. This includes not only financial difficulty but poor attendance (which are undoubtedly linked). Both have to do with the utter absence of young people in not only these churches but many mainline Protestant churches across the country. But in Harlem, there are very local factors as to why these smaller churches are struggling.

Eddie Glaude’s proclamation that “The Black Church is Dead” has had a vast ripple-effect across the Web. Recently, Candice Benbow, over at Selah and Amen, offered a lengthy assessment of Professor Glaude’s article.

The East Coast media establishment—both “conservatives” and “liberals”—continue to ask the same question about Senator Barack Obama: why did he keep his membership at Trinity United Church of Christ, where the Reverend Jeremiah Wright was the pastor? The question is asked as though Obama is naïve and Wright is a madman, neither of which is true. But what I find rather more amusing, or perhaps alarming—at least from a religious perspective—is that most of the media personalities who ask this question appear to have never belonged to any kind of religious community themselves. And this is, to a large extent, why there is so much misunderstanding about the relationship between Obama and Wright. […]